January Meeting Follow-up
Friday, January 29, 2010 at 01:26PM
We had a great meeting last night with a pretty full house and quite a few new faces. We started the night off with the Q&A where we had a couple good questions regarding when to go from HD to SD for delivery and one on editing video from a Flip camera in Final Cut. Our open mic session was dominated by Apple's newly announced iPad. I told a couple people I wasn't going to talk about it much yet, but I have a hard time stopping once I get started.
Our main topic of the evening was presented by Silver Platter Productions' Bernie Mitchell, who gave us the low down on the AVCHD format and two of Panasonic's cameras that shoot to that format - the AG-HMC150 and the AG-HMC40. He passed around the HMC150 and we all got a good lesson on video compression and the wide array of video formats.
After a short break, I showed a couple quick and simple tips & tricks - using the "<" and the ">" keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut and exporting your video as an image sequence, whether it be an image for each frame or just a few for your entire clip. Next up was a demo of Digital Anarchy's Beauty Box and Red Giant's Magic Bullet Mojo. I thought this was an interesting pairing of plug-ins, as both are based on the premise of making skin look good. They both do a good job of what they were created to do.
We finished the evening off by giving away nearly $1300 worth of items provided by our generous sponsors, whose names you'll see just over there to the right in the sidebar.
I was so impressed by Philip Bloom's video of Skywalker Rancher shot on the Canon 5D Mark II and 7D cameras, we screened it a couple times as people were heading out the door. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out now. If you have any interest at all in shooting video on DSLR cameras, his blog is a must read.










